Notes and Editorial Reviews

"This is a pleasant, if unremarkable, miscellany of some aspects
of the music of the Italian Renaissance. The CD booklet tells
us that “the compositions contained in this album constitute a
wide and varied anthology of the vocal and instrumental music
which flourished in Italy between the end of the 1400s and the
first half of the 1600s”. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and
the result is a CD which suffers from the sheer heterogeneity
of the music on it. It was recorded in 1990, but no mention is
made of any earlier release. Even in the sixteen years since 1990
the expectations ofRead more the audience for this music have changed.
We now expect more specialised programming – programming by genre
or location or narrower time-span, for example, or, where possible,
by single composer. This CD contains some examples of the frottola,
for example, the secular song form popular in the Italy of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; here they take their place
amongst instrumental pavans and galliards and other kinds of vocal
music, such as Riccio’s early cantata ‘Jubilent omnes’. Understanding
of the form, and a fuller appreciation of its various nature,
is however more readily to be had from a CD such as that by Marco
Beasley (the vocalist on the present CD) and Accordone, Frottole
on Cypres (CYP1643).

Beasley is an
interesting figure. He was born in Naples, son of an English
father and a Neapolitan mother, he studied singing and the
performing arts in Bologna. A meeting – and a brief period
of study, cut short by her early death – with Cathy Berberian
influenced him profoundly. He has an attractive tenor voice,
and his performances here – especially in some of the more
lyrical pieces, such as the anonymous ‘La pastorella si leva
per tempo’, which sets lines by the Florentine poet and scholar
Angelo Poliziano – are generally very pleasing. In some of
the faster numbers he sings with rather less tonal variety
than has characterised his later work. Another of the members
of the Riccio Ensemble has, of course, also gone on to bigger
and better things. Ottavio Dantone is perhaps now best known
as director of the Accademia Bizantina, based in Ravenna,
responsible for excellent recordings such as that of Vivaldi’s
opera TitoManlio on Naïve OP30413 (see review).
He has also made some fine recordings as a solo harpsichordist
(see reviews 1
and 2).
On the present CD he is largely restricted to continuo work,
although his performance of Andrea Antico’s intabulation of
Tromboncino’s ‘Vergine bella’ is well worth hearing. Talking
of what happened to the members of Ensemble Riccio in later
years, presumably the Luca Bonvini who plays the sackbut here
is the same Luca Bonvini who, as a jazz trumpeter and trombonist,
has gone on to play with many leading avant-garde musicians,
such as Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams?

The booklet
notes talk at some length about the various musical genres
represented here, but say almost nothing about the performers
or about the composers. This last is particularly unfortunate
as they are by no means all household names. What is useful
is that we are given the sources of each piece, whether in
a printed text or in a manuscript. That Angelo Notari’s ‘Canzone
passagiata’ should be taken from British Library Add. MS 31440
is a reminder that the Paduan Notari was in England by 1612,
amongst the musicians in the golden circle around Prince Henry,
that he was a prime agent in spreading knowledge of Italian
music in England, and that in one role or another he was in
London until his death in 1663, aged 93! In his last years
he was associated with Henry Purcell senior, father of the
composer.

Era di
maggio provokes many such lines of thought, and it makes
for pleasant listening."

Customer Reviews

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